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It was a beautiful object. A handsome hexagonal box, covered with Chinese characters, opened to reveal an elegant bottle on a wooden plinth. The spirit inside had the clarity of a Lao-Tse proverb. In the base of the bottle were six little Chinese scenes; in the base of the plinth was a ceramic tile, decorated with dragons. The producer, Shui Jing Fang, claimed 600 years of distilling heritage. Since it was Friday afternoon and the sun was shining I decided to pour myself a glass.

Shui Jing Fang is a “super premium” baijiu, which is the Chinese national spirit, distilled from rice, barley and a few other things. Baijiu accounts for about half of all China’s annual alcohol sales (which total £45 billion), enough to make it the fourth most popular spirit in the world. Drinks giant Diageo hopes to find a market for it beyond the Chinese community, and has launched it here through food supplier SeeWoo. It is 52 per cent proof and costs about £99 for a 500ml bottle — though, as I say, it is lovely to look at.

I have what I consider to be an equal opportunities palate. There are no bad ingredients, just bad cooking, I always say. If you consider flavour to be a spectrum, to deny any one is like refusing to watch films that contain the colour turquoise or listen to music in the key of E flat major. Moreover, I like what I’ve tried of Eastern spirits (such as Chinese wu jia py and Korean soju) and enjoy the rasp of high-proof liquor.

But baijiu is horrifying.

A promising floral aroma ceded to an acrid wash of putrefying dog and aniseed balls, before a minor industrial disaster took place on my tongue, leaving an aftertaste of napalm. Before long, the noxious smell of rotting rice penetrated the office.

Not since my friend Seb and I foolishly ordered Szechuan pig’s kidneys at Gourmet San in Bethnal Green Road have I tasted something that made me want to cry. I tried some on my colleagues. “Wargh! Raw sewage!” said one. “It burns!” said another. “It’s like a doctor’s waiting room,” said another. “Quite nice, actually.”

All of which leads me to conclude that within 10 years there will be a bottle of baijiu in every bar in Britain.

Consider Sambuca, the Italian aniseed liqueur that is pre-eminent among punishment drinks. (I was forced to consider half a bottle on my stag weekend). Most Sambuca is produced by Luxardo, an old family firm whose reputation rests on its maraschino liqueur. But their profits surely depend on Sambuca, a beverage whose USP is the fact that it is disgusting. How must that make the Luaxardos feel?

Aniseed is perhaps the most common constituent of the punishment drink — raki and ouzo are frequently ordered by sadistic revellers. Baijiu has strong notes of it but also hints at the medicinal category, which includes the ubiquitous Jägermeister, the quite nice Fernet-Branca and the delightfully named Hungarian Unicum. Moreover, like absinthe, baijiu is really strong, and I’ll bet that, like that Indonesian hellwater arak, it causes hallucinations.

In the interests of research, I have since tried the stuff diluted, iced and mixed with Coke (apparently, in certain elite Shanghai circles, they mix the finest clarets with Coke, so it seemed appropriate). All iterations were equally base. My advice? Lose the ornamental box, put together a vaguely Sinophobic marketing campaign and sell it in Oxbridge student bars as premium punishment. It will catch on in no time.